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7 Ways Thinking like a Detective Will Make You Smarter
Being Vulnerable Is Being Smart
By being authentic, Clarice disarmed Dr. Hannibal Lecter’s intellectual superiority. Instead of trying to compete with him, her vulnerability made Hannibal more cooperative.
Being vulnerable reflects the best on you and others. You don’t need to outsmart others to find a great solution. Vulnerability is not a weakness, but a superpower — what we reflect comes back to us.
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Key Ideas
Holmes practices mindfulness
Mindfulness means focusing on only one problem or activity at a time.
Our brain cannot do two things at once. “What we believe is multi-tasking is really the brain switching quickly from one task to the next.”
A study points out that those who are multi-taskers are less efficient.
Organize Your Brain Attic to remember more
The “brain attic” is Holmes’s analogy for the human mind and how we store information. Just consuming information leads to mental clutter that gets difficult to access when you need it.
We are more likely to remember something if we connect it to a sensory experience or previous action, like writing or connecting memories to smells or sounds.
Take a brain break if you want to be more creative
Holmes plays the violin, because it takes him out of his thinking mind and places him in a purely physical state.
“Taking mental holidays can be incredibly productive for creativity", even something as simple as taking a walk in the park during your lunch break instead of eating at your desk.
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Key Ideas
Aboriginal Memory Palaces
Australian Aboriginal memory palaces are associated with the land, structured by sung pathways called songlines. A songline is a sequence of locations that orientate or contain valuable resources. At each location, a song or ritual is performed that will always be associated with that particular location, physically and in memory. Thus, a songline provides a table of contents to the entire knowledge system.
Some cultures mix the skyscape with the landscape as a memory device; associating knowledge such as seasonal variations, navigation, timekeeping and the ethics of their culture with stories about the heavenly locations. Typically, only fully initiated elders would know and understand the entire knowledge system of the community. This secrecy and sacredness of critical information protects it from corruption.
Indigenous Portable Memory Aids
Rock art and decorated posts are famous aids to indigenous memory, but far less known are the portable memory devices. Incised stones and boards, tools, collections of objects in bags, bark paintings, birchbark scrolls, decorations on skins and knotted cords have all been used to aid the recall of memorised information.
Memory Palace
A memory palace, or a method of loci, is an imagined physical palace where one piece of information is placed in each site, allowing one to mentally stroll through their memory palace drawing out information in the required order without missing an element.
There is ample circumstantial evidence that many indigenous cultures around the world have been using it for at least 40,000 years to store, in modern terms, absurdly large amounts of knowledge. But our dependence on writing has eroded this skill.
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Key Ideas
Systematic approach
Having a systematic approach to how you deal with problems, as opposed to just going by gut and feelings, can make a big difference in how you creatively find answers to your obstacles.
Study the problem first
Detectives and investigators use the process. They ask both obvious and unthinkable questions.
Get close and collect information about how the problem is manifesting. Understand where the problem does and doesn’t happen, when the problem started, and how often the problem occurs to generate critical insight for the problem-solving effort.
Question for great answers
- Don’t look for solutions immediately; Keep redefining the problem until you arrive at the root cause.
- Don’t try to guess the solution; try to understand how the obstacles, or challenges manifest first.
- Gather data to analyze all potential root causes.
- Consider all options, regardless of how irrelevant they currently appear.
- Find a way to connect the dots. Make better analogies. One good analogy is worth three hours of discussion.